| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin American

Shawn William Miller. Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 325. $55.00.

This monograph thoroughly examines an aspect of the Brazilian colonial economy that has rarely been evaluated: the importance (or lack thereof) of the timber industry, both within the colony and in the larger context of the Atlantic world. Shawn William Miller focuses not on the simple fact of deforestation but asks several important questions about who profited, who did not, why Portuguese timber policy was so restrictive, and why it remained so even when it obviously did not work as intended. The end result was, of course, near-complete destruction of the coastal rainforests, but not, as previously thought, because of simple greed. 1

As the author repeatedly points out, the general deforestation of the litoral and its consequent species annihilation was certainly a tragedy. What made it an absolute disaster, however, was that the devastation provided no benefit or profit to anyone, from the colonists to the king. Destruction of natural resources has nearly always accompanied the European conquest of new lands, but normally it has resulted in an increase to the metropolitan fortunes, as well as making a number of individuals quite wealthy. Such was the case in North America, but not in the Brazilian forests. . . .

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